Digital Journal reviews the July 4 blockbuster that features robot wars, delicious special effects, and weaponry that would make the Pentagon envious. Entering the world of Transformers has never been so entertaining.
Digital Journal — There was more than one moment in the Transformers movie when my spine tingled every time a vehicle morphed to a robot. It happened when Optimus Prime changed into a semi truck, it happened when a boombox turned into a spider-like Decepticon robot. Call me a Gen-X nerd, but I couldn’t contain my excitement at finally seeing the 1980s cartoon wonderfully reproduced on the big screen, with every cyborg transformation looking as cool as you’d expect.
Produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys franchise), Transformers is the best action movie I’ve seen in 2007. Even at two-and-a-half hours, the quick pacing and flashes of humour kept my attention rooted during the pauses between explosive scenes. Whether you watched the old cartoons or not, this summer blockbuster will undoubtedly entertain you with a fascinating backstory, mind-boggling fight sequences, and enough robotic mayhem to satisfy the pickiest electronics buff.
The film begins slowly, introducing us to teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBouf) whose recent Chevy Camaro is acting strangely, to put it mildly. When he and love interest Mikaela (Megan Fox) realize the Camaro is actually a Transformer, they soon learn how the good guys — Autobots — are trying to defend Earth from the hordes of evil Transformers known as the Decepticons. In a Terminator 2-like plotline, the Decepticons hunt down Sam while the Autobots protect the precocious teen from Transformers who want to steal a coded map Sam unwittingly is selling on eBay (product placement, anyone?). When Sam finds out his car is the Autobot Bumblebee, and he later meets the other do-good robots, the fun truly begins.
What follows are four story lines that eventually converge. There’s the military plot, where two soldiers (Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson) who escaped an initial attack by an aggressive Decepticon, wander the Middle East to transmit crucial info to Washington. Another story follows a couple of code analysts hoping to hack Decepticon transmissions, although Bay injects a dose of humour into these sideline characters. The political thread is carried by a Secretary of State played by Jon Voight, who makes sure audiences realize how much these alien attacks have escalated into a national emergency. And of course the bulk of the film focuses on Sam and Mikael, hinting at blossoming romance, and giving us enough spectacular visuals to last us until, well, the sequel.
Costing $100 million, Transformers stars man-made robots spiced with CGI special effects to create unique characters.
As much as the human characters pull off their necessary emotional responses — shock when watching jets morph at 80 miles per hour, bravado when pulled into melées — the real stars are the Transformers. Designed using actual robotics and special effects courtesy of ILM, each Transformer smoothly flows back and forth into inanimate objects as if someone’s twisting a Rubik’s Cube. The film is worth the $100 million invested into the technology. I didn’t catch any clunkiness or aberration in the CGI; when I got that spine tingle every time a character transformed, I knew I was in for several minutes of intense robot-versus-robot action.
Credit Bay’s attention to detail for making sure each Transformer fought with a kung-fu touch. It’s not just blasting missiles and machine-gun rounds. The battle scenes feature building-to-building leaping, WWE-like body slams and acrobatics that would put spider monkeys to shame. I’ve never seen massive CGI robots swing off city bridges like I did in Transformers, so I have to give points to the filmmakers for creative originality. There’s no copycatting here.
But I have a few flies in the ointment to share. Sometimes, the fight scenes are edited so quickly it’s difficult to track the action. Maybe that’s the point, since the hulking robots move differently than humans, although audiences who hate non-stop cuts could get annoyed. It would’ve been more enjoyable for the camera to rest on the duel between Megatron and Optimus Prime, for instance, instead of editing scenes so epileptically my eyes started to throb.
It’s not unusual to see product placement throughout Hollywood films, but Transformers doesn’t disguise the insidious marketing. I wondered why Bumblebee didn’t change into a Volkswagen Bug, but perhaps the Chevy Camaro camp paid Paramount more for slipping their car into the film. GMC, eBay, Apple, Nokia and Mountain Dew all win prominent spots in Transformers, distracting audiences from what looks like a non-descript town in non-descript America.
The highlights of the film always include Autobots or Decepticons transforming at high speeds as they chase humans on city streets
Also, the cartoon purists will take issue with several changes in the movie version. Where’s Soundwave and Ratbat, the cassette-deck duo? Why doesn’t Megatron transform into a gun? Why does the film create its own history of how the Autobots and Decepticons descended onto Earth? Why is the Creation Matrix, the crystal that gives Transformers their powers, called the AllSpark?
I know what you’re thinking: only the most geekified man-children will care about the finer differences between cartoon and film. It’s no different than Peter Jackson’s retooling of The Lord of the Rings. Transformers will truly shine in the virgin minds of newbies who’ve never seen the cartoon, who will be amazed at how Spielberg and Bay forged a new 21st-century franchise from a live-action eye-popper.
I predict Transformers will sit on top of the box office for the majority of the summer, and not only because its pre-release buzz has reached almost iPhone proportions. The film deserves all the fawning for its impressive battles, thrilling plot and shocking conclusion bound to leave you itching for more. And there will be more, because watching robots transform into Mustangs is too enticing to stop at just one summer film.
